From: "Physics Receptionist" To: Subject: [Faculty] [Announce] Colloquium: 5/21/07 (candidate Wood-Vasey) Date: Tuesday, May 15, 2007 12:37 PM P H Y S I C S C O L L O Q U I U M Michael Wood-Vasey Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Supernovae, Large-Scale Surveys, and the Nature of Dark Energy ABSTRACT Solving the mystery of the dark energy accelerating the expansion of our Universe is quite arguably the greatest challenge facing the astronomical and physics communities today. My research efforts are directed toward addressing this problem through several complementary observational programs. I will begin my talk by presenting the first cosmological results from the ESSENCE supernova survey, which is a six-year project on the CTIO 4-m telescope to discover and study 200 Type Ia supernovae to determine the properties of dark energy. Supernovae have been and will continue to be a vital cosmological probe, but as diversity is a key part of any successful portfolio we have recently embarked on a program to use cosmological measurements of galaxy clusters to further constrain the properties of dark energy. This project will measure photometric redshifts, X-ray luminosities, and lensing properties of galaxies clusters discovered by the South Pole Telescope Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect Survey to determine the number density of galaxy clusters as a function of mass to provide a straightforward measurement of the evolution of volume as a function of cosmic time in the Universe. I will finish my talk with a discussion of the future of dark energy research in the context of upcoming wide-field survey projects and large-aperture telescopes such as Pan-STARRS, LSST, and the Giant Magellan Telescope. Monday, May 21, 2007 2:00 p.m. ENPH 501 Department of Physics Texas A&M University _______________________________________________ Announce mailing list Announce@physics.tamu.edu http://mail.physics.tamu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/announce _______________________________________________ Faculty mailing list Faculty@physics.tamu.edu http://mail.physics.tamu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/faculty